I still love spending a few days in London - even if it would be the better spend with Lisa rather than on my own. Somehow, I've not got the stomach / heart to eat alone at anything but the quickest and junkiest food stores of the type the goverment is looking to encourage us all to moderate on. Back now after 4 days of hard work (well, I can claim it to be hard) and 4 hours in the car on the London Orbital Car Park (a.k.a. M25) and associated roads.
So what is there about London? There's the atmosphere of walking around seedy shopfronts selling all manner of goods from lingerie to Halal fried chicken, from water pumps to beer, in the bustling Highbury where I was working, through leafy Georgian Housed roads where the leaves are falling off the London Plane trees in a welter of colour at this time of year. Seeing that the Caledonian Road baths have been renamed "Cally Baths", the affectionate name of the area being affectionatly taken by the local council and made official, and walking down "Copenhagen Street" and "York Way" - names that show the great history of the area.
But that's just one part of it; on two evenings, I made my way more into "town" and visited old haunts - Dillons (oops - Waterstone's) bookshop, and Foyles for a really excellent and overtempting selection of techincal books and seeing all manner of society all around and on all the corners. Only in London do you find the police chatting with the chap who looks like he's just crawled out of a cardboard box and has a slight wobble rather than hauling him off, and only in London do you get such a cosmopolitain mixture in such a small area and (at least I) feel safe there - perhaps more cos London's my own home town rather than due to any real saftey. And it's reassuring that the tube still breaks down from time to time (as it did on the xecond evening) and evenone's so stiff-upper-lip accepting of it.
I write my odd travel pieces here (and you can read that "odd" word in several ways) but I feel as I write about London that, perhaps, many of you know it already from introductions in the past few years, by in 8 years, or 12 years and counting. I've known it over 40. What are you impressions in just a paragraph of two? What makes London stand out?
